U.K. teacher charged in teddy bear case in court for trial
Associated Press
November 29, 2007 at 6:40 AM EST
KHARTOUM — Riot police surrounded a Sudanese court as proceedings began Thursday against a British teacher charged with inciting religious hatred over letting her pupils name a teddy bear Mohammed.
A tired-looking Gillian Gibbons, in a dark jacket and blue skirt, was not handcuffed when she walked into the courtroom in Khartoum, according to reporters who were briefly allowed inside but were subsequently dismissed.
"It's up to the judge, but from a consular point of view, we would like to be present," British Consul Russell Philipps said amid a crowd of about 100 people, mostly media, trying to get in.
Ms. Gibbons' chief defense lawyer, Kamal Djizouri, scuffled with a tight police cordon before he was allowed in.
This undated and unlocated portrait taken from the profile webpage of Gillian Gibbons on Friendsreunited.co.uk website shows the British teacher who was held Monday in Sudan for allegedly insulting Islam's prophet by allowing children to call a teddy bear Mohammed. (AFP/Getty Images)
Sudan charges U.K. teacher with insulting Islam
British teacher held in Sudan over teddy bear's name
The case set up an escalating diplomatic dispute with Britain, Sudan's former colonial ruler. If convicted, Ms. Gibbons faces up to 40 lashes, six months in jail and a fine, Sudanese officials have said, with the verdict and any sentence up to the “discretionary power of the judge.”
Prosecutor-General Salah Eddin Abu Zaid told The Associated Press earlier Thursday that the British teacher can expect a “swift and fair trial” under the Sudanese judicial system and that she had been provided with a legal defense team, as well as a private cell, mattress and blanket in detention.
“We don't think this will be a long trial, because there is only one article of the penal code to handle,” Mr. Abu Zaid said.
Prosecutors have previously said Ms. Gibbons, 54, was being charged under article 125, under charges of inciting religious hatred.
The country's top Muslim clerics pressed the government to ensure that she is punished, comparing her action to author Salman Rushdie's “blasphemies” against the Prophet Mohammed.
The charges against Ms. Gibbons angered the British government, which urgently summoned the Sudanese ambassador to discuss the case. British and American Muslim groups also criticized the decision.
Ms. Gibbons was arrested at her home in Khartoum on Sunday after some parents of her students accused her of naming the bear after Islam's prophet. Mohammed is a common name among Muslim men, but the parents saw applying it to a toy animal as an insult.
Mr. Abu Zaid said that he met with Ms. Gibbons on Wednesday and that “the lady was fine.”
Officials in Sudan's Foreign Ministry have tried to play down the case, calling it an isolated incident and predicting Ms. Gibbons could be released without charge.
But hard-liners have considerable weight in the government of President Omar al-Bashir, which came to power in a 1989 military coup that touted itself as creating an Islamic state.
The north of the country bases its legal code on Islamic Sharia law, and Mr. al-Bashir often seeks to burnish his religious credentials.
Last year, he vowed to lead a jihad, or holy war, against UN peacekeepers if they deployed in the Darfur region of western Sudan. He relented this year to allow a UN-African Union force there — but this month said he would bar Scandinavian peacekeepers from participating because newspapers in their countries ran caricatures of Prophet Mohammed last year.
Officials at Unity High School, where Ms. Gibbons taught, say she was teaching her 7-year-old students about animals and in September asked one girl to bring in her teddy bear. Ms. Gibbons then asked the students to pick names for the bear and they voted to name it Mohammed.
Each student then took the bear for a weekend to write a diary entry about what they did with the bear, and the entries were compiled into a book with the bear's photo on the cover and the title “My Name is Mohammed,” in what teachers in Britain said was a common exercise.
The school, founded in 1902 to provide British-style education to about 750 students from elementary through high school, has been closed since Ms. Gibbon's arrest. Most students are Muslims from affluent Sudanese families.
In Britain, the Gibbons family declined to speak with The Associated Press, saying the British government had advised them not to comment.
In Khartoum, the British Embassy said that diplomats were allowed to visit Ms. Gibbons on Wednesday and that she was being treated well.
Sudan's top clerics, known as the Assembly of the Ulemas, said in a statement Wednesday that parents at the school had handed them a book that the teacher was assembling about the bear.
The assembly, a semiofficial body generally viewed as moderate and close to the government, called on authorities to apply the full measure of the law against Ms. Gibbons. It called the incident part of a broader Western “plot” against Muslims. |
